I heard from my instructor FT will support on 4 processor .Is it true ????
and also any enhancement on vmotion .?.
just for curiosity microsoft support live migration on two different processor vendor ??

I dunno if you guys notice most of the features for vSphere, trickles down from VMware workstation, I will post the features of Workstation 2013 preview...

New OS Support - From our customers using Workstation who have opted in to share information with us we know that the popularity of Windows 8 is growing (at least as far as evaluating it in a virtual machine). We have been running the latest 8.1 version since the day it was released and are continuing to improve our support for it. Of course we are running the latest Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE and other Linux distros as well.

VMware Hardware Version 10 - This Technology Preview introduces hardware Version 10. Hardware versions introduce new virtual hardware functionality and new features while enabling VMware to run legacy operating systems in our virtual machines.16 vCPUs - In this Technology Preview VMware Workstation is shipping Hardware Version 10 and has enabled our users to create and run virtual machines with up to 16 virtual CPUs. Please let us know how this performs running your workloads. We have run CPU benchmarks, encryption/decryption and encoding/decoding programs to characterize the performance,

Note: Running Virtual Machines with 16 vCPUs requires that both your host and guest operating system support 16 logical processors. Your physical machine must have at least 8 cores with hyper-threading enabled to create and power on a VM with this configuration.

8 Terabyte disks - Virtual Disks can now add virtual disks greater than 2 Terabytes. There are some considerations, you cannot use the Buslogic controller for anything greater than 2TB and these large disks are tricky to setup as boot disks since your guest operating system would need to boot using EFI in order to read a GPT formatted disk which is required to access all of the sectors on a disk of this size.

Virtual SATA Disks - Disks can now be configured as SATA in addition to IDE and SCSI. This enables use of in box drivers for certain operation systems. We have not yet characterized the performance of SATA vs SCSI virtual disks.

USB Improvements - In Workstation 9, VMware added support for USB 3 devices. Most devices worked, but not all of the specification was fully implemented and we have found some issues with certain chipsets. We have been working on enabling streams which allows very large files to be transferred between USB 3 storage devices (that support streams) and the virtual machine at a very high rate of speed. We have also encountered issues when plugging in USB 2 devices into USB 3 ports and having them available in the VM (specifically iPods).

More VMnets - Due to customer demand we have doubled the number of VMnets in Workstation to allow more complex networked environments to be built and to reduce the likelihood of adding a virtual machine to a closed/secured/infected network.

SSD Passthrough - Windows 8 is capable of detecting when it is being run from a solid state drive (SSD) and optimizes itself for this hardware. In this Technology Preview, Workstation can detect when the Virtual Machine Disk file is being stored on an SSD drive and pass this information to the guest operating system to enable Windows 8 to make the same optimizations when it is running in a virtual machine.

Many additional changes have been made to this Hardware Version including some performance improvements, power savings and compatibility with new processors. We would like you to put this Hardware Version and the latest VMware virtualization platform through its paces to help us make it production ready.

Expiring Virtual Machines - VMware has enhanced the capabilities of Restricted Virtual Machines to include the ability to expire the virtual machine on a certain date and time. The intent of this feature is to enable our customers to create virtual machines to be shared with employees, students, customers, contractors etc. that will run until they self-destruct!

This feature establishes a secure connection to a web server at VMware.com or a server of your choice to validate the current date and time and prevent users from rolling back the clock on their host machine to avoid expiration.We have also added the ability to set the synchronization frequency to control the load on the network and a lease period to allow users to run expiring virtual machines while offline.

Virtual Tablet Sensors - If you happen to be experimenting with one of the new Windows tablets or writing applications to run on them, then we would appreciate you giving our new virtual GPS, Accelerometer, Inclinometer, Compass, Gyrometer, and Ambient Light sensor a try. If you run Workstation on a Windows 8 tablet and install Windows 8 in a VM, then all of the applications that you run in the guest should respond correct to the tablet inputs... so give your tablet a shake, twirl, tilt, spin and take it for a ride and let us know if your applications respond the same way in a VM as they do when they are installed natively.

New Converter - This Workstation Technology Preview includes a preview of the next version of VMware Converter. The Converter enables users to make Physical machines virtual. This version of the Converter includes support the following enhancements:

Guest operating system support for Microsoft Windows 8 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012

Guest operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Support for virtual and physical machine sources with GUID Partition Table (GPT) disks

Support for virtual and physical machine sources with Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)

Support for EXT4 file system

Support for vSphere 5.1 virtual machine hardware version 9

Pre-Released OVFTool - The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) is a virtual machine distribution format that supports sharing virtual machines between products and organizations. The VMware OVF Tool is a command-line utility that enables a user to import and export OVF packages to and from a wide variety of VMware products.The latest pre-release version of the OVFTool is included in this Technology Preview of VMware Workstation and is used by Workstation to upload and download virtual machines to and from vSphere. The OVFTool is also used to import an .OVF file which may come in handy when importing virtual machines created using desktop virtualization software developed by Oracle.We would appreciate your help in ensuring that the import, export, upload and download capabilities of Workstation have improved and in testing the import of VMs generated in VirtualBox.

VMware-KVM - Many of our customers have asked for a way to run a virtual machine so that their employees or students do not realize they are in a VM! In this preview we have included a new executable (on Windows only for now) that does just this. Run vmware-kvm.exe vmx-file.vmx from the command line and your VM will fire up in full screen with no toolbar or any other indicator that you are running a VM. You can use Ctrl-Alt to ungrab from the VM and the Pause/Break key to toggle between multiple virtual machines running under VMware-KVM. The user experience should be just like that of using a KVM switch - hence the name.

If you simply type vmware-kvm.exe from the command line you will get some options that can be used in this format vmware-kvm.exe [OPTIONS] vmx-file.vmx. If you run vmware-kvm.exe --preferences you will presented with an interface that allows you to configure certain behaviors - such as the key used to cycle betwen virtual machines. We would like to have enabled pressing scroll lock twice to toggle, but Windows makes this very difficult and since we aren't a hardware KVM we had to make a compromise.

Some of you may remember an executable called VMware-fullscreen.exe that previously shipped with Workstation. This is the latest generation of this feature with a major upgrade in display handling.

User Interface Enhancements:There are other small changes that have been included in this release that you may discover and we are continuing to add more features but here are a couple of items that you may come across:

Windows 8 Unity Mode Support - We are continuing to improve on how our Unity Mode user-interface works with Microsoft's "Modern UI" or the "Microsoft Design Language" (The new tile interface in Windows 8 formerly known as Metro). We have made some improvements and would like to know what you think!

Multiple Monitor Navigation - When running with 2, 3, 4 and even 5 or 6 monitors it has been frustrating to use the full screen mode in Workstation and toggle through each combination of monitors to get to the one you want. The fullscreen toolbar now has an option to choose your configuration and jump to it immediately.

Power Off Suspended Virtual Machines - I am sure that this has happened to you as often as it happens to me. You want to change the configuration of a virtual machine in your library that you use all of the time. You open up the virtual machine settings dialog and everything is greyed out because the virtual machine is currently suspended. Instead of powering on the virtual machine and waiting for it to boot up before powering it down to make the changes, the Technology Preview lets you simply power off the suspended Virtual Machine (as long as you don't care about what is in its memory).

Administrative UI (Web Client)
The 2013 Administrative UI is built around improved performance and a more native web applications feel.
• Improved usability and more search filters, along with the introduction of the 'recent object' tabs
help admins find and manager their key objects with fewer clicks.
• The new UI is built to manage larger inventories with a faster response time.
• Faster response time across the entire UI

vSphere Replication

The vSphere Replication release for 2013 adds the following new capabilities:

• Ability to deploy new appliances to allow for replication between clusters and non-shared storage deployments
• Multiple points in time support allows administrators to recover to a previous snapshot thus providing protection from logical corruptions in the application that may have been replicated.
• Storage DRS Interoperability - allows for replicated VMs to be storage vMotioned across datastores with no interruption to ongoing replication
• Simplified Management - Deeper integration into the vSphere Web Client to configure and monitor replication within the VM and vCenter management panes simplifies the management experience for replication
• VSAN interoperability to protect and recover virtual machines running on VSAN datastores
vCenter Orchestrator
With this release, vCenter Orchestrator is greatly optimized for growing clouds because of significant improvements in scalability and high availability. Workflow developers can benefit from a more simplified and efficient development experience provided by the new debugging and failure diagnostic capabilities in the vCenter Orchestrator client.

Virtual SAN

Virtual SAN is a software-based storage solution built into the hypervisor that aggregates the hosts’ local storage devices (SSD and HDD) and makes them appear as a single pool of storage shared across all hosts.

VMware Virtual Flash (vFlash)

Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) Highlights:
This vSphere version supports > 2TB vdisks (vmdk size). Customers will be able to create vmdks upto 64TB. Large files can now be contained within a single vdisk. vSphere version 5.5 and VMFS 5 is needed to create >2TB vdisk.

vCloud Director Virtual Appliance
The vCloud Director beta includes support for the vCloud Director Virtual Appliance to help facilitate PoCs and Evals.
 vCloud Director cell is available in a virtual appliance form factor for quick-and-easy deployment and setup. With the appliance you can choose to use an internal/embedded database or an external database of your choice (Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle).
 As with prior releases, the vCD virtual appliance is available for PoC/Eval use only. For help with deploying and configuring the vCloud Director virtual appliance please see the vCloud Director 5.5 Virtual Appliance Deployment Guide available in the Beta Community.
Content Catalog
This release includes multiple enhancements to the Content Catalog.

vCloud Networking & Security
Networking Enhancements
This release contains two major networking enhancements
Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP): Provides increased bandwidth, better load balancing,
improved link level redundancy and easier operations for hypervisor uplinks connected to physical network.
• Today, vSphere5.1 supports a simplified version of LACP with support for single Link Aggregation per host and limited choice of load balancing algorithms.
• LACP in vSphere5.5 allows for a rich choice of over 22 load balancing algorithms and 32 LAGs per host and ensures the largest density of physical NICs can be aggregated.

Security Features
Distributed Firewall is a key service in the Software Defined Datacenter. It secures and isolates workloads inside the virtual environment. Key new features:
Performance: High performance stateful firewall at hypervisor of each host

vCenter Site Recovery Manager 2013
Feature Highlights: Here are some key features supported in the beta refresh:
• Support for vSAN with vSphere Replication • SDRS / Storage vMotion interoperability • New configuration option to support vSphere Replication Multi-Point-In-Time snapshots during failover

VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager (MHM) 1.1
The MHM 1.1 release adds the following new capabilities:
• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V3 hypervisor (as well as Windows 2008 R2 and 2008).

If you carefully read VMware will release a Virtual Appliance for vCloud Director 5.5, people who worked with 5.1 release knows that they need to configure a Red Hat Linux and need to install the vCloud Director RPM on to it.